Social Metabolism, Ecological Distribution Conflicts and Valuation Contests in the Environmental Justice Movements arising worldwide.
Economic growth goes together with growth and changes in the flows of energy and materials. The industrial economy is not circular, it is entropic. This gives rise to conflicts at the frontiers of commodity extraction and waste disposal.
A world movement for environmental justice is arising whose protagonists are involved in disputes over similar commodities, they resort to similar repertoires of action, they display a variety of valuation languages (often opposed to economic valuation).
The day after receiving the 2023 Holberg Prize in Bergen, Holberg Laureate Joan Martinez-Alier will join Professor Mariel Aguilar-Støen, of the University of Oslo, in conversation at the House of Literature in Oslo. The conversation topic is chosen by the Laureate.
The event is open to all.
Participants
Joan Martinez-Alier
Joan Martinez-Alier is professor emeritus at the Environmental Science and Technology Institute of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB). He is also professor emeritus at Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLACSO), Quito. His research focuses on ecological economics, political ecology, agrarian studies, environmental justice, and the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous. In 2016 he was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant for the project EnvJustice (A global environmental justice movement), 2016-21. Martinez-Alier is also a co-founder of the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas). Based on the EJAtlas, Martinez-Alier will publish the volume Land, Water, Air and Freedom: The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice in 2023. The book will analyse hundreds of “ecological distribution conflicts” and the “valuation languages” displayed by poor and indigenous activists. In 2020, Martinez-Alier was awarded the Balzan prize, and in 2023 the Holberg prize.
Mariel Aguilar-Støen
Photo: University of Oslo
Mariel Aguilar-Støen is Professor of Human Geography at the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM) at the University of Oslo, where she leads the research group “Rural Transformations”. Her research has focused on agrarian change in various parts of the world, including countries in Latin America. Currently she leads a research project focusing on avian flu and its impact on social and political relations in agrarian societies in Norway and Denmark. Aguilar-Støen has published three books and numerous academic papers dealing with socio-environmental conflicts related to extractive industries, tourism development and forestry as well as on the role of elites in environmental governance.
